Thursday, July 15, 2010

Results of Campus Party Colombia 2010

As I said in another post, I was invited to Campus Party Colombia to give a talk about KDE SC 4 and to do a workshop about OpenAM. The event went really well and I had lots of fun the whole week. The talk about KDE, althought I had a LOT of problems to getting it going, it ended very well and attendants liked it a lot. The available chairs were all taken (around 30 - 35) and there were at least four or five more persons standing up watching the presentation. The name of the talk was "KDE SC 4: Breaking Paradigms". I made a little short intro video to start the talk, with the objective of showing attendants what they could spect to see during my presentation.

Here is the video:

During the talk, I did a broad definition of what the KDE Software compilation is and which are their components and applications. Then I started to show each of the Plasma Workspaces, some of kwin's 3D effects, the desktop activities, doing demos of all of that. I also showed some videos of stuff that I didn't had how to demo there, like Plasma mobile running on a Nokia N900 cellphone, Qt multi-touch support and prototype stuff like Plasma Media Center.

After that I did a quick recap of the KDE platform, talking about the main components of it: Solid, Phonon, Akonadi and Nepomuk, explaining their function and how they make a developer's life easier. Here I did some other demos of Nepomuk, like tagging files and then searching for them on dolphin or krunner, saving searches as folders or looking for a recent accessed file on dolphin's time-line.

Next I demo'ed some applications, like Amarok, rekonq, kopete, gwenview, aKular, ksnapshot and yakuake, although I mentioned some others that I coiuldn't show because of time constraints. I also talked about KDE on Windows, for which I had a demo prepared, but as I said before, I had some problems at the beginning of the talk and I had to switch computers at the last moment, leaving my Windows VM on other machine.

And leaving the best for last, I talked about the KDE community: who we are what we have achieved and how someone can contribute in different aspects different from coding (translating, bug reporting testing and promoting), which many times is seen as the only way of contributing to an open source project.

I want to thank to some users at the KDE forums and kde-promo list, whom gave me some really neat ideas of what to show or how to organize the talk, it was a really useful help :)

The OpenAM workshop went really well too, it was also full and was marked as one of the most attractive talks on Campus Party and because of that, it was broadcasted live over the Internet :) here are the recordings Campus Party uploaded to youtube if anyone wants to watch them (in spanish):

First part:

Second part:

I gave some introduction to what Single Sign On (SSO) is, the problematic it solves in an enterprise, which are the advantages of using a SSO solution, related security concepts like authentication, authorization, auditing and identity federation. Then I presented OpenAM and talked about how it can address all of the problematic that was exposed before, it's installation requirements and demo'ed some of it's features. At the end, the attendants did a workshop that walked them through all the process of installing OpenAM and configuring it to protect a Java web application and doing SSO with another one.

There were also some really nice talks that I enjoyed watching, like the one from Steve Wozniak (one of Apple's founders) and another about client-side pentesting. You can find all of the talks on Campus TV website.

In conclusion, it was a really fun event and I hope to be invited again next year :D